Clinton Email Controversy

Yes, I do work for the AF, sys admin in the research labs, and jail isn’t an automatic. Again, intent. What would really look bad is saying I mishandled classified out of laziness or just a disregard for procedure because I was in a hurry at work to get a project done. The fallout would depend on how I handled myself once caught. Fudging the truth instead of coming clean would not be good. But I’ve seen engineers circumvent every process and procedure that’s repeatedly taught and reinforced by information assurance and security personnel and get little more than a slap on the wrist. Not even a formal writeup in their personnel file.

That said, I could very well get myself fired. Malicious handling of classified would land me in jail. I don’t think anyone is asserting that Hillary was being willfully malicious, more that she was avoiding fed regs on oversight and accountability like so many apparently do these days with their email.

I posted on FB last night that if it comes down to Cruz/Rubio/Trump vs Hillary, I don’t think I can vote. I turn 52 later this year, I’ve always voted, I feel like it’s my duty as a citizen to do so, but for the last 20 years I’ve been pulling that lever for the lesser evil and I’m not sure I can do it this year if those are my choices.

That said, I still think this situation is being blown out of proportion.

Yes, I do work for the AF, sys admin in the research labs, and jail isn’t an automatic. Again, intent. What would really look bad is saying I mishandled classified out of laziness or just a disregard for procedure because I was in a hurry at work to get a project done. The fallout would depend on how I handled myself once caught. Fudging the truth instead of coming clean would not be good. But I’ve seen engineers circumvent every process and procedure that’s repeatedly taught and reinforced by information assurance and security personnel and get little more than a slap on the wrist. Not even a formal writeup in their personnel file.

That said, I could very well get myself fired. Malicious handling of classified would land me in jail. I don’t think anyone is asserting that Hillary was being willfully malicious, more that she was avoiding fed regs on oversight and accountability like so many apparently do these days with their email.

I think this is fair, in that it’s clearly not something like treason. Nothing has suggested that Clinton did something like Snowden, intentionally disseminating classified data.

But at the same time, intentionally violating rules about how to handle classified data, even for stupid reasons like laziness, is still criminal. Perhaps a minor crime, but I think it’s still a crime.

For Hillary specifically, I think that this contributes to a perception of some that she’s considers herself above the law.

I would agree though that many are politicizing it. But unlike the Benghazi thing, I think that there seems to actually be some wrongdoing there.

So is speeding. Do you think having a speeding ticket in the past has any bearing on whether someone is qualified to hold high office?

I think it’s more severe a crime than speeding. It’s also directly related to holding high office, since such a position would require handling of highly classified information.

Finally found something that does a good job of summarizing the situation:

That was helpful. Thanks.

This morning at work, the only thing people wanted to talk about after last night’s 2nd Presidential debate was Hillary Clinton could be hiding in those 33,000 emails that she deleted after she was subpoenaed by congress.

During the debate, instead of answering this charge, she said to go to her website. I went there today, and I don’t see any explanation about the deleted emails. What am I missing?

Speculation here at the office was that it had to be something so damning, that it would mean she couldn’t be elected President anymore, so she had to delete them. People in the office are still going to vote for her because they think Trump is worse, but I got the impression that everyone was feeling extra horrible about having to vote for the lesser of two evils this morning.

Is there any latest article or clarification on these deleted emails that lays things out?

Honestly, I’d rather read from another source than the person whenever someone is defending themselves. Sure their point is good to have, but a third-party is almost always going to cite their defense anyway.

You can read the huge FBI report, and the State Department report, if you want the raw data.

TLDR: The reasons she so loudly said she never did anything classified in email is her workflow with marked classified stuff by design was all using printed/faxed documents in the SCIF. The ‘classified’ emails are almost all entirely classified after the fact – things like forwarding a New York Times story that mentions a classified program classifies the email.

The absolute highest security stuff here is the ‘top secret’ emails of which there were 8. These were messages from ambassadors to officials in the state department who were desperately trying to reach them to call off or otherwise respond to news of an incoming drone strike, but they were caught away from a secure facility and couldn’t get to one before the drone strike so they fired off regular emails to the state department.

The 3 messages marked confidential were not only mismarked in that there was no header, but I believe in all but one case didn’t even contain classified data anyway. And they weren’t messages sent by Hillary Clinton either.

You can read all about the various server and email issues in the FBI report. They basically say it amounts to the normal IT stuff – changing servers, changing devices. It sounds like she setup her own server for two basic reasons: 1) When she came into the State Department it was a total dinosaur. People didn’t have desktop computers, there was almost no way to check email outside the office or on mobile devices, and she wanted to get going right away. It sounds like she basically said, “I don’t give a fuck, let’s get email going it’s like 1996 in here right now.” 2) She may very well have wanted to avoid FOIA requests, and while it wasn’t against the law, it’s borderline whether it was against department policy. Although they did end up complying with the requests in the end. And it’s worth noting that the official State Department email that Clinton was supposed to be have been using was publicly hacked multiple times during this period, with absolute certainty. You can find the news reports. And while her private server may have been hacked and apparently wasn’t that secure, it may have been surprisingly more secure than the official one.

For real? In 2009??

[quote=“Gordon_Cameron, post:90, topic:78076, full:true”]For real? In 2009??
[/quote]

Reminds me of seeing cops using typewriters in the Wire and wondering what third world country they were operating within.

I wasn’t talking about classified vs unclassified stuff. That was stuff that came out a while ago. I was talking about last night’s accusation that she purposely deleted 33,000 emails after congress subpoenaed her for the emails, and what sort of things could be in those emails. The fact-check website linked above says:

[quote]A contractor managing Clinton’s server deleted the emails. There is no evidence Clinton knew when they were deleted.[/quote].

It’s a pretty far distance from “there is no evidence Clinton knew” to “she didn’t know”. It strains credibility that she wouldn’t know. Right?

The official explanation from the FBI report was that, basically she had asked for a batch of e-mails to be deleted months before subpoena. The contractor had neglected to do so until after.

Regardless of the investigation, the people I know (all trump enthusiasts) still up in arms over the emails are utterly livid she hasn’t been put on trial. This one single fact is the absolute most important deciding point in this election for them. They hold an unwavering opinion that she’s getting away with something and they will not reward her for it, and they will not budge on this issue. And this issue outweighs all else to them.

Their talking points are:
She broke the law. A conspiracy saw to it that she was never put on trial. And a bad judgement call was made when deciding not to try her for the crime she committed because the investigator/prosecutor decided to give her a pass because of some sort of intent clause. And this is something they want ruled on by a judge and jury, not an investigator or prosecutor.

Similar to how Trump’s debate #2 answers always rounded right back to ISIS, no matter how far removed the question, every single discussion they will ever hold about this election comes right back to the email scandal and subsequent free pass.

Strong email retention policy and blowing the hell out of ISIS. What else do you want in a candidate?

Pages 18-19: According to Mills, in December 2014, Clinton decided she no longer needed access to any of her e-mails older than 60 days. […] On March 2, 2015, The New York Times (NYT) published an article titled “Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email Account at State Dept., Possibly Breaking Rules.” […] In his interviews with the FBI, REDACTED [a PRN techie] indicated that sometime between March 25-31, 2015, he realized he did not make the e-mail retention policy changes to Clinton’s clintonemail.com e-mail account that Mills had requested in December 2014. […] He believed he had an “oh shit” moment and sometime between March 25-31, 2015 deleted the Clinton archive mailbox from the PRN server and used BleachBit to delete the exported .PST files he had created on the server system containing Clinton’s e-mails.

This explains why data was removed from the PRN server after the New York Times article and after the Benghazi committee had subpoenaed Hillary’s emails. It had nothing to do with anyone around Hillary Clinton. An IT guy at PRN realized one day that he’d forgotten about the retention order and went ahead and implemented it.

The report makes clear that Cheryl Mills sent an email, which the PRN techie received, telling PRN about the preservation request from the Benghazi committee. The techie said he knew it meant he shouldn’t disturb the Clinton server but apparently got confused and didn’t realize this meant he shouldn’t touch the old archives or the backups.

The other important aspect of this is that the FBI recovered many thousands of these deleted emails – from servers, from the sender and receiver clients, from mobile devices – and there was nothing notable about this set of emails that got deleted in this manner, which is part of why they found this to be a credible accounting.

Page 22: The FBI interviewed multiple officials who authored and/or contributed to e-mails, the content of which has since been determined to contain classified information. USG employees responsible for initiating classified e-mail chains include State Civil Service employees, Foreign Service employees, Senior Executive Service employees, Presidential employees, and non-State elected officials.

Note that Hillary Clinton herself isn’t on the list of authors.

And while I hate to throw Powell under the bus as an excuse, as SoS he retained literally zero emails because he used a private server that “didn’t capture the data.” so there were absolutely zero emails to be turned over or recovered. Hillary running her own server and making an effort to turn over work related emails is miles beyond that.

A theory of mine coalescing over the last few months that this comes down to a most fundamental difference of all - the difference between men and women. That much of what is happening with the current political climate is a result of the “rise of women” and their different expectations and standards.

In brief since I’m hammering this at work on the phone is that men (to be very general) think in legal terms; what matters is not what is moral but what is legal. So it’s perfectly acceptable for Newt Gingich to divorce his dying wife while prosecuting Clinton because it was Clinton that broke the law. If you look at history, the history of men and legal codes goes back thousands of years, all united by men creating laws that restrict their behavior and then finding loopholes which permit behavior, only to be closed by new laws and then skirted around with new loopholes. It’s why legal codes in a living legal system never get smaller in number but ever more numerous.

The point here being why these “traditional conservative” men can’t stand the Clintons; they got away with breaking the law. It even possibly explains why conservatives seem so anti-woman; in a he-said, she-said case, no clear judgment can be cast, where modern women expect that the fact of their bringing suit is evidence enough of wrongdoing and that where there is smoke there is fire.

I’m going to fantasize that the inverse is true. Sign me up for an all-female government!

From campaign email leaks, a draft a speech Clinton never gave about the email:

"Hello. I thought you might find it useful to have some answers to share with your friends if they ask about all these news stories out there about my email habits when I was Secretary of State. So I want to take some time to try and explain it to you directly, in one place, at one time, as best as I can.

"Please bear with me because parts are confusing, and like many of you, I don’t understand all of the technological aspects. [But when you hear all the facts, I think you’ll agree that all the political noise over this issue is just that — political noise.]

"In 2007, when I was a U.S. Senator, I got my first Blackberry. I used it to keep up with the news, with friends & family — and yes, I also got my fair share of unsolicited forwards that sometimes made me laugh and sometimes made me want to throw it away. In short, I used email like most people.

"Fast forward to 2009. One of my husband’s staff members bought the domain name clintonemail.com so his team could switch from the various email providers they were relying on to one consolidated system. I joined them.

"This was all before I started my new job as Secretary of State. Had President Obama not asked me to join his team, if I had stayed in the U.S. Senate, I still would have switched to this new email.

"And when I did get to State,‎ it seemed simpler to have just the one address. After all, my predecessors at State had not relied on Department email. In hindsight, though, this has proven anything but simple.

"But I can’t do it all again. I can only tell you it was a mistake, regret it, explain it, and help State and others fix any challenges it caused.

"That’s what I did. Now I want to explain what I didn’t do.

"I didn’t keep my email secret. Whenever I emailed, it was from my address. Whenever people emailed me, it was to ‎my account. Work, personal, whatever. And yes, I continued to get my fair share of unsolicited forwards.

"I also didn’t do this to skirt rules. And I didn’t do it to avoid having my records preserved. When State asked former Secretaries of State who served in the era of electronic communications to help fill out the archival record, I did so, printing 55,000 pages of email including anything related to my work at the State Department. To get a sense of how outdated some of the government’s archiving practices are, we had to print all 55,000 pages because that’s what the rules demand. Believe me, printing more than 30,000 email instead of handing them over electronically isn’t something anyone does by choice.

"That’s 30,000 more emails than every other former Secretary produced combined.

"And yes, there were 30,000 more messages that were completely personal and had nothing to do with official business.

"I do believe transparency in government is important. And by this point, there isn’t much you don’t know about me. My finances are out there. My medical history is out there. You know how much I’ve made, where I’ve gone, what I’m allergic to.

"But what wasn’t work wasn’t the government’s business. ‎So I didn’t keep those emails. I didn’t print them. I knew no matter what I decided to do with them, I was in for criticism. So I chose to keep a modicum of privacy. I hope you can understand that.

"Now I want to address the most serious aspect.

"When it came to classified information, I certainly never used my Blackberry. And that had nothing to do with using a personal email address. If I had been [email protected] I could not have used it for classified information either. At the State Department, mobile devices aren’t used to communicate secrets. Almost everything of a classified nature was presented to me via paper or in person. When I traveled, elaborate steps were taken. ‎Secure phones were set up, secure tents were constructed. More than once when a tent was set up in some far-away hotel, I was told to read the classified material with the blanket over my head. No, that’s not a joke. I took my responsibilities in safeguarding our nation’s secrets seriously. So did my team did. Everyone at the State Department did.

"‎This process of looking backwards to see if something should have been classified at the time is fine. I don’t want anything released to the public that puts us at risk. And we’re all learning that different agencies have very different views and procedures about what should be classified and what shouldn’t. What’s not fine is to criticize people — especially career officials who have devoted their lives to serving our country — for handling what they didn’t know might be deemed classified years later by another part of the government. That’s an impossible standard to meet. Members of Congress and their staff also handled some of these messages.

"Some articles being written about this issue today contain classified information. Should someone sending that article to a colleague be told in 2020 that they broke the rules? I hope not.

"As for the security of my email, ‎in more than a little bit of irony, every day we learn of a new hack by the Chinese, by the Russians. That millions of Americans’ personal information has been stolen.

"As Secretary I was proud of what we accomplished. I was proud of the thousands of people who’ve dedicated themselves to public service‎ — including those who came into State with me and left with me. I was proud of them then, I’m proud of them now.

"I wish that a video was enough to address this. I know it isn’t though. But I wanted to try to put everything in one place.

"Along those lines, after nearly a year of offering to come up at any time anyplace, in October I’ll be on Capitol Hill before the committee looking at the tragic events of September 2012 in Benghazi, Libya. They wanted to talk to me behind closed doors, but I insisted on all of you being able to see what I was asked and how I answered.

"I’m sure this issue will come up. It’s unclear to me how it will help us understand what happened in Benghazi or how to help prevent future tragedies — but I’m going to do my best to answer whatever they ask.

"And while I can’t predict the future, let me finish by taking a stab:

‎"• There will be many more email to pour through.
“• Some will be serious, some will be embarrassing.
‎”• You know I’m not great with a fax, but you’re also going to learn my secret salad dressing recipe and who sent me LinkedIn requests. (And whose I didn’t accept!)
"• There will be more dramatic leaks and assertions that prove to be untrue.
"But at some point, you’re going to have them all. And if you suffer through all 55,000 pages, you’ll be able to judge for yourself.
"Which is how it’s supposed to work.
“If you’ve made it this far, thank you for watching.”

I’m sure that will get the same breathless coverage that some of the rest of the leaks do in the MSM.

/s

Wall Street speech emails arrive. Apparently, she says horrible things like, “we need to figure out a way to fix this without destroying what works,” and “the voters expect the people they elect to do something about this.” The horror.